Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred.

If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare… they may appoint teachers in every state… The powers of Congress would subvert the very foundation, the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America.

Once you realize that you can do something, it would be difficult to live with yourself if you didn’t do it.

The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors. Why is my freedom or my citizenship, or my right to live there, how is it conceivably a question now

I believe that the unexamined life is not worth living, and the writer certainly cannot afford any self-delusion for his subject is himself and the world he is in.

If you don’t look at it, you can’t change it. You’ve got to look at it.

In order to accommodate me, in order to overcome so many centuries of cruelty and bad faith and genocide and fear, all the American institutions and all the American values, public and private, will have to change. The Democratic Party will have to become a different party

It’s really an attack on the white man’s assumption that he knows more about you than you do, that he knows what’s best for you, and that he can keep you in your place for your own good and also for his own profit.

We must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is.

It’s a very mysterious endeavor, isn’t it. And the key is love

We have to make our own definitions and begin to rule the world that way because kids white and black cannot use what they have been given.

What we need is somebody who can coalesce the energies in this country, which are now both black and white, into another party which can respond to the needs of the people.

On restoring peace: “It is not the black people who have to cool it.

What we need is somebody who can coalesce the energies in this country, which are now both black and white, into another party which can respond to the needs of the people

Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of—and justify—as a racial war

If the American Negro, the American black man, is going to become a free person in this country, the people of this country have to give up something. If they don’t give it up, it will be taken from them.

Pressure is being brought to bear by the people in the streets, especially by the poor and by the young, so that movement leaders are always in a position of having to assess, very carefully, their tactics.”

What [Stokely Carmichael] is suggesting that frightens the American white people is that the Black people in this country are tied to subjugated people everywhere in the world.

We call it riots, because they were black people. We wouldn’t call it riots if they were white people.

[This revolution] is for Negroes to liberate themselves and their children from the economic and social sanctions imposed on them because they were slaves here.

I object to the term “looters” because I wonder who is looting whom, baby.

What causes the eruptions, the riots, the revolts- whatever you want to call them- is the despair of being in a static position, absolutely static, of watching your father, your brother, your uncle, or your cousin- no matter how old the black cat is or how young- who has no future.

God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

One way of gauging a nation’s health, or of discerning what it really considers to be its interests—or to what extent it can be considered as a nation as distinguished from a coalition of special interests—is to examine those people it elects to represent or protect it. One glance at the American leaders (or figure-heads) conveys that America is on the edge of absolute chaos, and also suggests the future to which American interests, if not the bulk of the American people, appear willing to consign the blacks

If you have people up in the United States Senate filibustering about whether or not you are human, then obviously you are going to have a reaction in the streets.

I speak of change not on the surface but in the depth—change in the sense of renewal.

I don’t believe you do the right thing because you think it’s the right thing. I think you may be forced to do it because it will be the expedient thing. Which is good enough

The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has always been implicit—was to make black people despise themselves.

The question really is a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation. That’s what segregation means. You don’t know what is happening on the other side of the wall because you don’t want to know

[Lorraine Hansberry] was very worried about a civilization which could produce those five policeman standing on the Negro woman’s neck. In Birmingham, or wherever it was. And I am too. I’m terrified At the moral apathy. The death of the heart. Which is happening in my country.

We know that democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a deadly—and, finally, wicked—mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire to the best that is in him, or that has ever been.

In a debate against William F. Buckley in 1965: “The Southern oligarchy, which has still today so very much power in Washington, and therefore some power in the world, was created by my labor and my sweat, and the violation of my women and the murder of my children. This, in the land of the free, and the home of the brave.And no one can challenge that statement. It is a matter of historical record

The differences between the North and the South were really evident when the chips were down. They had different techniques of castrating you in the South than they had in the North, but the fact of the castration remained exactly the same, and that was the intention in both places.

You can’t have a war on poverty unless you are willing to attack those people [in power] and limit their profits.

In the New Yorker, 1962: “God is black.

One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear to glory in their chains

They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.

Black power frightens them. White power doesn’t frighten them. Stokely is not, you know, bombing a country out of existence. Nor menacing your children. White power is doing that

When asked by Esquire what white people should say to fellow white people: “That if I go under in this country—I, the black man—he goes, too.

My experience with liberals, they have attitudes, and they have all the proper attitudes. But they have no real convictions, and when the chips are down and you expect them to deliver and what you thought they felt they somehow are not there.

The question of colour hides the graver questions of the self and that’s why the whole thing is so hard to overcome and why It’s so dangerous for our society.

I’ve never written a speech. I can’t read a speech. It’s kind of give-and-take. You have to sense the people you’re talking to. You have to respond to what they hear.

I couldn’t sit somewhere honing my talent to a fine edge after I had been to all those places in the South and seen those boys and girls, men and women, black and white, longing for change. It was impossible for me to drop them a visit and then leave.

I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it.

The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

I’ve been compelled in some ways by describing my circumstances to learn to live with them. It’s not the same thing as accepting them.

On writing himself into the narrative: “I had the idea that most people found me a hostile black boy; I was not that. I had to find a way to make them know it, and the only way was to use myself.

On becoming a writer: “I’d been a preacher for three years, from age fourteen to seventeen. Those were three years which probably turned me to writing.

Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.

Communication is a two-way street, really, it’s a matter of listening to one another.

It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait.

I envisage a world which is almost impossible to imagine in this country. A world in which race would count for nothing.

One cannot be romantic about human nature; one cannot be romantic about one’s own nature.

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality

In New York the color of my skin stood between myself and me, but in Europe that barrier was down.

I moved to Europe in 1948 because I was trying to become a writer and couldn’t find in my surroundings, in my country, a certain stamina, a certain corroboration that I needed.

I did not intend to allow the white people of this country to tell me who I was, and limit me that way, and polish me off that way.

I could not sing. I could not dance. I had been well conditioned by the world in which I grew up, so I did not yet dare take the idea of becoming a writer seriously.

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

In order to achieve the life I wanted, I had been dealt, it seemed to me, the worst possible hand

You have somehow to begin to break out of all of that and try to become yourself. It’s hard for anybody, but it’s very hard if you’re born black in a white society.

As far as I knew when I was very, very young there’d never been anything … called a black writer.

There seemed to be no way whatever to remove this cloud that stood between them and the sun, between them and love and life and power, between them and whatever it was that they wanted.

What is happening in this country among the young, and not only the black young, is an overwhelming suspicion that it’s not worth it.

I was a black kid and was expected to write from that perspective. Yet I had to realize the black perspective was dictated by the white imagination.

You can’t teach a child if the situation in which he is studying is intolerable… no Negro child who is going to a segregated school, which costs millions of dollars, is fooled about why he’s there. He’s there because white people want him there and no place else.

It comes as a great shock around the age of five, or six, or seven, to discover that the country to which you have pledged allegiance along with everyone else has not pledged allegiance to you.

If you walk out of Harlem, ride out of Harlem, downtown, the world agrees what you see is much bigger, cleaner, whiter, richer, safer than where you are. They collect the garbage. People obviously can pay their life insurance. Their children look happy, safe. You’re not. And you go back home, and it would seem that, of course, that it’s an act of God that this is true! That you belong where white people have put you.

When I write a play or a novel, I write the ending and am responsible for it. Tolstoy has every right to throw Anna Karenina under the train. She begins in his imagination, and he has to take responsibility for her until the reader does. But the life of a living human being, no one writes it. You cannot deal with another human being as though he were a fictional creation.” (In an interview with David C. Estes)

The standards of the civilization into which you are born are first outside of you, and by the time you get to be a man they’re inside of you.

The American Negro has had to accommodate a vast amount of hatred since he’s been here

I don’t consider myself a spokesman—I have always thought it would be rather presumptuous

For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.

Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually

If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Perhaps the turning point in one’s life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one

And once you realize that you can do something, it would be difficult to live with yourself if you didn’t do it.

“It is true that the more one learns the less one knows

All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are

Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read

Writers are extremely important people in a country, whether or not the country knows it.

Does the law exist for the purpose of furthering the ambitions of those who have sworn to uphold the law, or is it seriously to be considered as a moral, unifying force, the health and strength of a nation?

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it.

The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world

The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other lifeYou have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have

Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

People can cry much easier than they can change

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within,” Baldwin wrote in his best-selling 1963 novel.